Speakers
Description
In light of the urgent environmental, social, economic, and political challenges of our time, urban design and planning education must evolve to equip future practitioners with transformative skills. This paper presents a pedagogical approach that foregrounds student agency, interdisciplinary engagement, and systemic thinking to prepare them for the complexities and urgencies of real-world challenges. This approach requires students to take an active stance, and choose their roles and ways of engagement. Drawing on extensive teaching experiences at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Utah, as well as advisory roles in TUM’s Urbanism Graduate Program, we critically reflect on our methodologies and advocate for a studio-based learning model that empowers students as proactive agents of change.
A key feature of this approach is the emphasis on student agency from the very beginning of the semester. Students are encouraged to take ownership of their education by designing their own projects and reaching out to actors outside academia even before the studio formally begins. In the open call, we emphasize urgencies and encourage positionalities towards contemporary crises, positioning educators and students as peers facing shared global challenges. Rather than preconceived questions, scales, and sites, we provide a framework for discussion and idea development. During the studio, we establish and maintain a non-hierarchical and collaborative learning environment, and encourage the students to shape their studio proactively.
A distinctive element of this framework is its focus on fostering social entrepreneurship among planning students, inspiring them to create “spin-off stories”—projects that extend their academic work into practical, impactful solutions. By grounding the studio in real-world connections from the outset, we ensure that students develop actionable strategies in collaboration with diverse stakeholders, bridging the gap between academia and practice.
Through case studies and outcomes derived from our urban design research studios, we illustrate how this pedagogical approach prepares students to become influential contributors to sustainable and equitable urban development. By integrating social entrepreneurship and fostering student agency, we emphasize the importance of creating educational environments that transcend technical knowledge, enabling students to actively shape their education and develop a critical stance in addressing global challenges.
This contribution adds to the evolving discourse on planning education, highlighting the urgent need for curricula that nurture a generation of planners prepared to lead transformative urban initiatives and actively co-create a just, resilient, and inclusive world.
| Keywords | spatial education; design studios; agency in education |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
